1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to data transfer methodologies and, more particularly, to an address assignment mechanism.
2. Description of the Related Art
Typically, bus systems for PC boards assign nodes to physical addresses, or use some form of ordering to assign base addresses to slave devices. Ethernet requires an associative addressing scheme, where each slave device has a unique ID, and communication is addressed by name. USB uses physical positions on hubs for addressing purposes.
Using chip select wires usually requires additional pins on at least the slave devices. Associative addressing schemes that use globally unique IDs (e.g., Ethernet) may require excessive bandwidth to transmit the globally unique IDs. Additionally, an infrastructure is required to create and maintain these globally unique IDs for every part or device that is manufactured. Positional identification (e.g., USB) typically requires some kind of physical hub to perform address assignment.